To Sell My Life As Dearly As Possible Summary and Analysis

Thomas Moss, one of three owners of the People's Grocery in Memphis, Tennessee, is arrested along with his partners Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart during a riot in 1892, then taken from the jail and lynched. Prior to his death, he left a message urging "my people" to leave Memphis where there is no justice and to "go west." His death prompts Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells to action. Terrell lives in Washington, D.C., is twenty-nine, married and expecting her first child when she hears that her childhood friend, Moss, has been lynched. Terrell and Fredrick Douglas approach the then U.S. President Benjamin Harrison to publicly condemn lynchings, but Harrison refuses. Meanwhile, Wells, a journalist known for her activism, urges a boycott of White-owned...